


Company's All Right With Me

by starlurker



Category: As the World Turns
Genre: Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-21
Updated: 2010-06-21
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:31:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlurker/pseuds/starlurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid gets all the hard knocks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Company's All Right With Me

Reid opened the door to the house and stared in shock as two Katies were pulling each other's hair out, with Doogie Hughes getting in the middle and getting the worst of one Katie's vicious swipe with her lacquered red nails.

"Some help?" Doogie yelled out, and Reid switched to crisis mode. He restrained the Katie who was hitting and spitting at everything she could touch.

"You son of a bitch, let me go!" Katie-Who-Scratches screamed.

"Not until there's a DNA test handy, sweetheart," Reid said, pinning her arms around her back. Thank God for martial arts classes, the saviour of gay children who had the sense to take them. A certain arm twist and Katie-Who-Scratches was effectively immobilized, but she started to swear like a sailor instead. Reid would be impressed if he wasn't so freaked out. "Anyone want to tell me what's going on here?" He had to shout to get heard over KWS' filthy diatribe.

Now that he looked at the Katie who he wasn't restraining, he could see that she was the Katie he knew and was inordinately fond of despite himself.

"Thanks, Reid," Real Katie said. She looked a little worse for wear with snatches of hair missing from her scalp and bloody scratches on her face. Doogie was standing by her side as if afraid that she would knock him out too. Real Katie extravagantly gestured at Katie-Who-Scratches and said, "Reid, meet my evil twin Synnovea. She's charmed, can't you tell? Chris, can you get some rope and duct tape please? And call the police?" Doogie ran off like a pet dog while Katie sat down on the couch and with visible effort that wasn't like her at all, attempted to compose herself.

Reid waited for the punchline and realized with growing horror that there wasn't going to be one. Thankfully, Doogie returned quickly and with a lot of swearing on Reid's part – Synnovea had pointy boots that should have been classified as knives – they were able to tie her to a chair and put duct tape on her mouth, leaving her to seethe resentfully near the kitchen, but far away from the knives.

"Your evil twin Synnovea? Seriously?" Reid said.

"I've had a long odd life, Reid. What can I say?" Katie said, a weary smile on her face. Doogie sat beside her and rubbed her shoulders briskly.

"She's not cold, you idiot," Reid said. "She's been attacked by her evil twin. Get the first aid kit."

To his credit, Doogie looked properly shamed and went into the bathroom to get some supplies.

"Be nice," Katie warned. "You weren't the first one here, and you weren't the one kicked in the no-fly zone."

Reid felt a little bit of sympathy, even if it was over Katie's dubious choice of boyfriends. He was hit in the balls by an angry visually impaired woman once. She had taken some self-defense courses for the blind and had expertly placed her walking stick in between his legs while pretending to be upset. She did it so impressively that Reid complimented her once he got up from the fetal position on the floor. He really liked her a lot, and the feeling was mutual in the end. To this day she sent him e-mails with pictures of ugly men she found on the internet.

"Can you explain to me how you have an evil twin named Synnovea now?" Reid asked.

Katie sighed. "Do you have time?"

"Yes."

"Where's Luke?" Katie asked suspiciously.

"Luke is somewhere doing Luke-y things. Talk."

When Katie finished, Reid went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of whiskey in one of the cupboards. Doogie had joined them by this time and when the doorbell rang with the unforgivably late police and ambulance, the three of them had a toast while Synnovea tried to kill them by looking.

***

"My God, is Katie OK?" Luke asked.

"She's fine – a little shaken up, but the physical injuries aren't serious. I'd say the real challenge here is discovering she has an evil twin."

"What do I say on the card for the flowers I'm about to send her?"

Reid thought about it and shrugged. "My shoulder's here?"

"Good enough," Luke replied, and typed the order out on his iPhone. "What kind of name is Synnovea anyway?"

Reid stared at him. "Katie has an evil twin and that's one of your questions?"

"It's an odd name!"

"Yes, Synnovea is an unusual name but did you hear the part about where she thinks she was given several rounds of cosmetic surgery to look like Katie? In an underground bunker? What the fuck is with this town?" The other diners at the restaurant started giving him looks, with Luke being the leader. "Oh, don't look so goddamned martyred. It's weird. This town is weird."

"And yet you're here," Luke said.

"Because you're here," Reid said.

Luke flushed (adorably wasn't a word in Reid's dictionary) and had that perplexed, flattered look on his face which meant that he had no idea what to do. Reid reached out to take Luke's hand in his when he heard a throat clear behind him.

Being in close confined spaces with annoying patients made Reid extremely aware of their most annoying tics.

"Hello, Noah," Reid said without looking back, knowing he was correct when Luke drew his hand back so fast Reid could potentially have wrist whiplash. "What brings you to this part of Oakdale? The decor? The fact that it's the only decent restaurant in Oakdale?"

"Hi Luke," Noah said. "I'm not sorry to interrupt, but I need to talk to you about something, and Dr. House here can't know about it."

"Yeah," Luke said, clearly flustered. Reid leaned back in his chair and opened his menu.

"I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?" Luke asked, a plea in his voice.

"Sure," Reid said behind his menu. The grilled goat cheese on a bed of arugula and cranberries looked good. The New York strip steak was pretty good, even if was really more Buffalo than Manhattan, but in Oakhell, it was as good as he could get. He heard Luke's chair move back, heard Luke ask Noah if there was a problem. He did his best to keep calm.

The salad was served and Reid had already inhaled half of the grilled goat cheese when Luke came back.

"Sorry, that took longer than expected."

"They always do."

"Reid," Luke said. "Give him a break. Give us a break."

Reid looked up from his admittedly delicious salad. "Sure," he said, lying through his teeth. "Sure thing."

***

Dr. Hughes was one of Reid's favourite people, but he'd never admit it out loud, especially to Bob's face. This was important when Bob was assigning him truly idiotic cases like this one.

"There's a new patient that needs a neurology consult. She claims her name is Synnovea von Rothschild, but she bears a remarkable resemblance to—"

"Katie, I know," Reid said. "I was there for Ms. von Rothschild's Oakdale debut. Why does she need a neurology consult? And before you bore me, I'm aware that she thinks she's Katie's twin. A psych consult seems more appropriate."

"We did a preliminary scan on her and there are strange abnormalities in her results."

Reid was a simple man in many ways, and Bob knew how to bait the trap. Damn him.

"I'll check on her right now."

"Good. Please inform me when you've finished examining her. We both have to report to the police about our findings today and for the rest of the tests that you might have to schedule."

"Aye aye, sir." Reid grabbed the charts Bob handed him and went into the patient's room, steeling himself for drama.

Synnovea's temper probably hadn't improved since the last time he saw her; her ankles and wrists were strapped to the bed.

"Ms. von Rothschild, we meet again."

"Fuck you, quack."

"Charming. I need to check up on you and I'd rather do it with your cooperation, but considering the circumstances that brought you here, no one will raise any fuss if I ask for sedation. Your call."

Synnovea, for all her blatant hatred of everyone around her, had some common sense. "Could these tests prove that I am who I actually say I am?"

"They could," Reid said cautiously, "keeping in mind that I wouldn't know what someone in your position's neural pathways would look like, but I can verify that I haven't seen anything like it."

"You could prove I'm real," Synnovea said. "From what I hear, you're a big shot doctor."

"The biggest," Reid agreed. "Not many would disagree with me. But I'd have to find something for them to disagree with. And how would you have heard about my reputation?"

"That incompetent old coot who was here before you said so."

"Don't call him that," Reid warned.

Synnovea looked taken aback by how stern Reid's voice was. "I'll cooperate, Doctor. No need for sedation."

"Restraints have to stay."

"Of course. I won't even bite off anyone's ear if they lean next to me, I promise."

Reid wondered how this became his life that that statement was a sign that she was actually sane. He told her about the tests he had ordered, all of which Synnovea agreed to, and she even signed all the necessary documents. In a few days, Oakdale would have some answers about the mysterious Ms. von Rothschild.

***

"Her neural pathways are remarkable," Reid said, sighing as Luke gave him a scalp massage. Katie's couch had since been cleaned so the blood stains from her fight with Synnovea were hardly visible. Reid propped his feet up on one end of the sofa and relaxed his neck and head on Luke's lap.

"I've never seen anything like it. She's not a twin obviously, but there are odd similarities with Katie's brain that I can't quite reconcile. And what's really exciting is that she's not crazy! Her scores are off the roof as far as IQ is concerned, and she has some rage issues, but she's not cuckoo at all."

"Are you supposed to be telling me all this?" Luke asked. "Won't you get into trouble with doctor-patient confidentiality rules and all that?"

"The newspaper is releasing all this information tomorrow as part of a story. You're just getting a scoop that's good for a few hours before the news hits."

"Okay," Luke said. Reid would be touched at how relieved Luke was, but he hasn't forgotten about the Noah conversation a few days back.

One of Luke's most endearing habits was his inability to change a song he has associated with a person in his life on his iPhone, as trite and as cliché as some of them could be. Most of the time, Luke kept his iPhone on vibrate ("Shut up, it's not for kinky reasons," Luke had denied), but when he was off work, he turned the music rings on. Lily and Holden's ring on Luke's phone was an instrumental string of Simon and Garfunkel's _Bridge Over Troubled Water_. Lucinda's was _Barracuda_ by Heart, which Reid thought was really insulting before Luke explained his grandmother's take on the song. Reid's, embarrassingly, was Aretha Franklin's _Dr. Feelgood_ because of The Incident. He had made Luke promise over and over, the threat of lousy blow jobs with teeth in his future, that The Incident would never be brought up again.

So of course, just at that moment, Luke's cell phone rang, Mariah Carey's screeching vocals yammering out _no way you're ever gonna shake me, ooh darling you will always be my baby_.

"Is this another conversation I can't know about, even though it involves you and your fucking ex-boyfriend who will apparently always be your baby?" Reid couldn't help himself and didn't want to – he was fuming and he made it obvious.

"I've been meaning to change that," Luke said weakly, clearly knowing this was pathetic, even for them.

"I'm going to bed. Don't join me. You know where the door is." Reid relished the feel of Luke's fingers in his hair for just one more moment before getting up.

"You are blowing this way out of proportion," Luke said.

"You're having conversations with Noah, Luke. Detailed, intimate ones that you can't tell me anything about from what I can gather. Forgive me if I'm not a big enough man to forget our wretched history. I gave you a scoop today that everyone in this worthless town would kill people for, and you can't even give me a crumb?"

"Because it's between me and Noah," Luke said, seemingly determined not to budge. "Noah and I had a life before you, and we have a connection outside of you. I can't make it go away, and I don't want to, not even for you."

Reid knew this, but hearing it confirmed that there would be no clean break was confirmation he didn't want to hear after all. It was like there were steel bands wrapped around his head and his chest squeezing so tight that everything became numb.

Luke looked sick. "Reid, that doesn't mean what you think it means—"

"I can't hear your explanations right now," Reid said. He was tired. "Let's try again in a couple of days, 'kay?"

"Reid," Luke pleaded.

"Good night, Mr. Snyder." A habit from days long past. Luke's eyes glistened as he walked out the door. Reid stopped by the bathroom to get some aspirin before going to bed. A sleepless night awaited.

***

One look at his face convinced his interns, the nursing staff and other doctors that a rough day lay ahead of them. They all stayed away, so their self-preservation instincts were still intact, which was about the only good thing he could say about his coworkers.

His bad mood turned into concern upon seeing the area near Synnovea's room. Katie was there, clearly upset, along with Doogie and Dr. Hughes who were attending to the two unconscious policemen.

"What happened?" Reid barked out, running to the scene.

Katie had gone past panicked and was into terrified. "Reid," she said, her voice tremulous, "she knocked out the police and took their guns. We don't know where she is."

"Can anyone in this goddamned town do their jobs right?" Reid said.

"Now is not the time for recriminations, Dr. Oliver," Bob said.

"How are they?" Reid asked.

"They're alive. They've just been tazed," Doogie said.

"I've already called the police," Katie said.

"I've issued a Code Silver," Bob said as he checked one of the policeman's vitals.

"Well, at least two people know how to do their jobs," Reid grumbled. "Is there anything I can do here? Katie, you need company?"

Katie smiled so bravely that Reid, for just one minute, imagined a life where he was heterosexual, just so he could rescue her from the deadly boredom that must come from dating Doogie Hughes.

"I'm good. Thanks, Reid," she said.

Properly distracted, Reid wondered where Synnovea could have gone. If she was as smart as she appeared a few days ago for the tests, she was probably long gone. He went into the break room, lost in thought as he opened the fridge door to get his sandwich, when he heard footsteps behind him.

"Don't move, quack," Synnovea said.

And my week just keeps on improving, Reid thought. "I thought you were smarter than this," he said. "Shouldn't you have knocked someone out on the parking lot and made your escape by now?"

"That old bastard paged the code before I could get out," Synnovea said.

"Can I turn around? Unless talking to my ass is a high priority."

"Don't try anything anything funny while you're doing it," she warned. Reid slowly turned around with his hands up and saw Synnovea's panicked face, her hastily worn scrubs, her steady hands a marked contrast as they held the gun. She was about 8 feet in front of him in the shadow of the vending machine, visible only if you entered the break room.

Part of the knowledge Reid accrued by living in firearms-loving Texas was knowing when a gun still had its safety on – cliché but true. Reid knew he had the advantage and took the gamble. He ran towards her to disarm her quickly, comfortable with the odds. He didn't count on Synnovea knowing how to click the safety off quickly.

With measured deliberation, she pulled the trigger.

Reid felt himself flung back with the force of the bullet and landed on his back, the linoleum cool on his skin where his scrubs lifted up from the fall.

The break room's ceiling was typical square white ceiling tiles, he noted. The fluorescent lights were glaringly white. The emergency sprinklers were silver flowers in strategic spots. There were cobwebs in the northeast corner.

Luke, he thought. And Reid tried to stop it, but the darkness overwhelmed him.

***

_"Hi", Luke said. "My God, I've been waiting for so long. Come on, we're taking my private jet and we're going to Ibiza." The sky was filled with three suns, seven moons and multitudes of stars. Luke had shoes with wings that could make him float. The plane was a giant syringe._

"That's so ten years ago," Reid said.

"Exactly," Luke said. "Everyone's gone by now so it will be just us, plus a few other smart people like us." He fluttered about, the wings on his shoes flapping like hummingbird wings.

"I don't like orgies."

"But they have lots of drugs," Luke said. "Here, these will make you feel better."

"Thank you," Reid said, gulping down all the pills with no water.

"Better?"

"Much."

"I'm still so confused," Reid said.

"It will be better soon, I promise," Luke said. Reid took Luke's hand as they raced on foot to the private jet, Luke babbling all the way. "We'll have us a real good time, and even though there's lots of water, there won't be floods. We won't need a big boat. We won't need two of each animal, because there's only one Katie."

"How do you think the lions stopped themselves from eating the antelopes?" Reid asked.

"Magic. I know some," Luke said, grinning from ear to ear.

"You do," Reid said, amazed at the beauty in front of him.

***

When Reid woke up, the world was blurry around the edges. He recognized the equipment around him and even in the haze of what he recognized were very good drugs, he knew that he was out of the woods. Antibiotic drip, painkiller drip, IV, monitors – there was nothing here so far that meant he had permanent injuries.

"Reid?"

He turned his head and saw Luke, who looked god-awful with greasy hair, pale skin, chapped lips, dark circles around his eyes, and loaned scrubs that fit him like a tent.

"How're you feeling?" Luke whispered.

"Like I've been shot," Reid said, wincing a little at his raspy voice. "You look terrible."

Luke smiled. "So do you. You don't look anything like a male model, unless you're going for heroin chic."

"Gunshot chic," Reid said. "Big thing in Texas." He shifted on the bed in an attempt to get comfortable. "How long have I been here?"

"Four days," Luke replied.

"Yay me. Was anyone else hurt?"

"Just you." Luke paused, loudly gulped at air. "Reid," he said, his face crumpling. He put his head down on the mattress next to Reid's hand and gasped for breath, trying not to cry and failing miserably. Reid mustered what strength he could and stroked the shell of Luke's ear, his fingertips going behind the curve as if tucking away a long strand of hair. Luke raised his head from the bed and held on to Reid's hand, tucking his face into the palm like he always did when they were alone.

"Synnovea?" Reid asked.

Luke's eyes and expression hardened like centuries-old stone. "Jail. And if I have anything to say about it—"

Reid shushed Luke with his fingers.

"Hi," Reid said.

"Hi," Luke replied, confusion plain on his face.

"How's your week been?"

Luke squinted at first, but Reid felt his alleged cold dark heart expand when he saw Luke get it, that being shot by a woman who thought she was the twin of his landlady was the last thing he wanted to talk about.

"Well, I did paperwork, which was brutally boring," Luke said, a bit shaky. "I arranged some meetings with the contractors and the architect about the new wing, but you know what that's like when they see me – nepotism and trust fund in one inexperienced bundle. But that trick you told me worked like a charm." Reid smiled while Luke continued talking, getting into the spirit of it but in muted tones. "I went into that room thinking _'I can buy each and every one of you judgmental assholes and still have time to attend a charity fundraiser'_ and it took about 30 minutes, but I think everyone knew that I knew my shit."

"Grandma was awesome yesterday, by the way. Craig – I told you about Craig right?" Reid nodded. "Craig was accusing her of some random shit, and she goes, 'Craig darling, if I had as much time and money to invest in your son as you seem to think I do, I'd be going after someone I could actually do more with.'" Luke grimaced. "I mean, awesome in that she gave that guy what he deserved, but sort of gross too."

Reid laughed, as painful as it was with the gaping hole in his chest that some mediocre surgeon in this hospital repaired. He'd sue if there was any damage.

"I said goodbye to this guy I know," Luke continued, meeting Reid's eyes. "I thanked him for everything he did for me, for everything that we carried each other through. He's going to try and be a director in New York. We left it in as good a place as it can be left."

Reid closed his eyes. "New York's a great city. We should go there on vacation someday," he said.

"Maybe," he heard Luke say. "Can I ask you a question?"

Reid nodded.

"Do you even need to know what the doctors who treated you said, or did you already figure everything out?"

"Confirmation can't hurt." He braced himself for potential bad news.

"You'll be OK. No permanent damage. You might get some weakness in your left shoulder and arm, but it's nothing exercise can't cure after you're better."

"Damn, I'm good," Reid said.

He heard Luke laugh, but it still sounded broken somehow. He opened his eyes and saw Luke fighting tears again.

"I'm happy you're here," Reid said. "Please stay."

"I can't think of any place I'd rather be," Luke said. Cheesy line, but Luke always won points for sincerity. He felt Luke's hands go into his hair and sighed with pleasure. "Go to sleep," Luke continued. "I'll be here when you wake up."

Reid drifted into peaceful sleep with the sensation of Luke kissing him on his forehead, with the sound of Luke's voice saying three words that Reid swore he would say back when he woke up tomorrow.

***

The next day, Reid went through with his vow made the previous night and marvelled at how his world could change so drastically with so little said.

  
THE END


End file.
